Comments on: Meaning from a set of meeting minutes

By: Eoin

Eoin — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 22:18:55 +0000

Well if you manage to do it, and I imagine you will, fair play. It would be a great resource!

By: James Gallagher

James Gallagher — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 22:00:50 +0000

Thanks for that John. So far I've just written the basic section parsing and the name parsing. So, from testing I seem to be able to pick up all the names that get mentioned in the minutes. Getting the motions isn't too bad but it looks like two things will be quite messy: relating a proposed motion back to its motion identifier and then picking up the subsequent voting. I'll probably just go with some kind of near the motion text logic to do that. Thanks also for the tip on the Google Group … oh, and the inspiration!

By: John Handelaar

John Handelaar — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 21:50:04 +0000

Councils (that I'm aware of) don't have transcripts, there's only this.

That said, from your description above it looks like a line containing 'proposed that', followed by N lines, followed by a line containing 'was seconded by', would be regex-able. And a bit of name parsing might allow a person to generate per-councillor RSS feeds of activity.

You're not a long way from this sort of thing at that point.

(I've not really addressed the contents of the rest of the minutes, but you get the thought process.)

Perhaps join the KildareStreet-new-registered-organisation list and see if we can get some other eyes on it? That goes for all the other commenters too :)

By: James Gallagher

James Gallagher — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 15:25:12 +0000

I'd hope to be able to make it more generic once I get some more experience with techniques for this. The reason for the minutes choice is that I want the information and the improved context so it's a good motivator.

By: Michele Neylon

Michele Neylon — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 15:21:43 +0000

So would this work on minutes only or would you be able to do something with a transcript?